EARS, obviously.

My ears, while not as offensive as my feet (I know because Dan has never referred to them as "troll ears"), are still not the best.

When I was born, they stuck way out to the sides. They stuck out so much that when the lady from the adoption agency called my parents to tell them I'd arrived, she decided she'd better warn them about the ears.

"We have a beautiful baby girl for you," she said, "but her do ears stick out."

Later, I had a surgery to make them not do that, and so ended my ear saga.

That is, until this last winter.

All of a sudden, I noticed that my left ear stuck out farther than my right. I thought I was imagining it, but Rachel confirmed. She checked with her dad, who's a plastic surgeon. Sure enough, otoplasty has a 10% attrition rate.

I was worried that I'd think about my ear nonstop for the rest of my life, but what happened was I forgot about it after a week or two, and then just remembered this week. Just in time for E.

Here's photographic EVIDENCE. Yes, I know I look ridiculous. I pretended to blog while I took the photo, so it would be authentic.

We have an ongoing DILEMMA.

Mac is a terrible sleeper. Shef was a terrible sleeper before him, and remained so until his fourth birthday. I tried to speak reasonably with Mac about his nighttime habits in the following video:



You can see we're also dealing with fairly large cases of DENIAL and DELUSION.

I choose "Correspondence."

I picked up Amy Krouse Rosenthal's book (the whole basis for this challenge, I daresay THE BEST CHALLENGE EVER) at the library today, and while I've just begun it, I'm already charmed.

In the beginning of the book, there's a chapter called "The Evolution of this Moment," which explains how The Encyclopedia of Ordinary Life came to be published. Rosenthal gives some examples of correspondence she's had and kept over the years: correspondence with writers she's admired, rejection letters, and just numerous exchanges large and small with various people who influenced her work. Awesome people like Ira Glass.

When I was in ninth grade, I, like Rosenthal, was compelled to write to an author I loved, Jon Hassler. Guess what? He wrote back to me on yellow legal paper in long hand. I loved that letter, and I showed it to my teacher and she hung it on the bulletin board.

It didn't even occur to me to be embarrassed by the extent of my dorkitude.

I continue to love correspondence. I love emailing people and getting emails. I loved writing letters to my grandmothers. Of course, I love commenting on people's blogs and getting comments. And txting, obvi.

I'll probably continue to correspond for the foreseeable future.

I'm going with BEACH READS.

As everyone knows, I'm currently finishing up some serious academic reading for my summer school class; however, next week I'm going on my Dream Vacation in The Dells, and I'm going to want to download some footloose-and-fancy-free books to my iPad.

Here's my situation: I read pretty widely. I like serious, literary-type fiction, and I also like the whole Shopaholic series.

Right now I'm reading The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which I really like, but that book features ghosts. I'm not good at reading about ghosts (or violent crime or suspense) before bed.

Can you suggest a beach read that's very engaging and that I'll be able to read at all times of the day and night? Following in the footsteps of Challenge Bloggers Rosalyn and Lee, I'm going to offer incentivized commenting on this post:

If you give me a BEACH READING (full disclosure: I'll be reading this at a WATERPARK) suggestion in the comments, I'll send you a post card from my trip to the Wisconsin Dells. If I don't have your address, you can Facebook it to me. If we're not FB friends, you can send it to my blog email thesavvymomblog @ gmail.com.

Okay! I'm so excited!

My A is Astral Phantasmagoria

Here's what happened: I decided to take a class called Contemporary American Drama, which has been excellent. I read a ton of plays I'd never read or seen before, and I learned about drama and theater.

Yesterday, I was finishing a paper about how Baudrillard's concept of simulation works as a framework for reading post-modern drama, and I complained to Rachel that I can never write a good conclusion.

"That's okay," she said. "It's because you've already said everything you want to say three times. And how long is your paper?"

"Twelve pages," I told her.

"Oh," she said, waving her hand, "then just don't even worry about it because you know your professor is going to be so tired of reading it by then."

So, just as I was ready to slap a period on the last sentence I'd written and call it a paper, I found a perfect quote from an article by Elizabeth Klaver in which she claims that Baudrillard's gap between the real and the sign for the real "produces astral phantasmagoria that radiates out of the desert" and allows us to see America in new ways in the theater.

Astral Phantasmagoria! OMG! It's Poe's spirits flying through the air searching for authenticity. I'm probably going to use that phrase a lot from now on.

I'm really excited because my BBFF Lee has posed a July blogging challenge.

You can see a really cool video about the challenge at Lee's blog. CHECK IT OUT!

I'm starting tomorrow with the letter A. I already picked my topic, but I'm not telling until July 1.

Word.

I mean, Letter.

When Mac started crawling out of his crib, we got him a nice little toddler bed and a gate for his door.

This has been a total nightmare, pretty much. We have to sit with him while he falls asleep and then visit him and rest with him in his TODDLER BED many times during the night. If we don't do these things, hours of screaming ensue.

"Mac," I said to him this morning, "why won't you sleep in your bed all night long by yourself?"

"Ummmmm," he said. "Bug in my bed."

"There's not a bug in your bed," I told him.

He shrugged and walked away.